Notes
P7: At heart, fashion is all about the art of self-adornment: the visual presentation of ourselves to the external world. What we choose to wear reflects how we view the world and how we want the world to view us. (…) they are all tied to our very human need to express individuality.
P14: (…) the intrinsic role that clothes play in the creation of character and the telling of a story that is both believable and meaningful.
P90-91: You are what you wear. Recently a colleague of mine at the London College of Fashion asked a group of staff to undertake a deconstruction an reading of the clothes he was wearing. He then challenged us to share our conclusions about his background, education, leisure interests, food preferences and cultural choices; really anything we thought we could decode from his her, accessories, clothes, shoes and coat. My colleague undertakes this same exercise with new students each year in order to get them thinking about the many ways we decode and read people we meet on a day-to-day basis and how we balance our lived experiences with the stereotypes pushed through films, TV shows, newspapers and magazines. (…) It made me think how carefully I choose my clothes, accessories, hairstyle and even make-up because I think that together they say something to the world about me, about who I am. In a way, we use our clothes as a proxy for language, and as with all communication our appearance can be misunderstood. We can misread others and in our globalized world the opportunity for miscommunication are becoming even greater.
P98: Our fashion footprint. (..) the clothes we wear, we are constantly developing our own social, cultural and political ideas and ideals. Your cultural footprint is the sum total of your cultural input and output. It expresses who you are in very real terms. Your cultural footprint is most easy to visualize in the context of the internet. (..) Globaly, we seem to have so much and yet we are in danger of losing our national and cultural identities as well as our own personal style and individuality. We are being encouraged to accept one culturally acceptable look. Will we forget that our cultural engagement with clothes is also part of who we are?